Mitali Saran: Dear men, please understand that sexism is the unjust air we breathe
A striking feature of
the last few weeks has been the number of well-meaning men who, before this
current round of the #MeToo phenomenon, ‘had no idea’ that sexual harassment,
abuse, and assault is so rampant. Their blissful ignorance is as enraging as
the violations that women face all their lives, because it goes to the very
heart of male privilege. That privilege is that they never needed to know, because they are unaffected by it. Those who know,
severely underestimate its extent—most stories circulate among women because
male privilege has fashioned a world in which being uninformed about these
stories costs a man nothing, and telling these stories publicly costs women
enormously.
Men who know how widespread sexual
harassment and abuse are, and who do nothing differently, are
complicit in maintaining that privilege. Those men who perpetrate violations
upon women, do so regardless of what they know, because male privilege ensures
that they will pay no price for doing so - it may even earn them some brownie
points from the toxic masculinity department. Well now you know,
even from the tiny tip of the iceberg that is #MeToo. But only a few of you
fully understand it.
Here’s what men do not
understand, not by a long shot: They cannot, even the best of them, fully
understand how deep and wide the horrors go, because patriarchy and sexism are the unjust air that they breathe. In this
air, men can take breathing entirely for granted. In this same air, every
single woman has asthma. Please go with this metaphor for a bit. The best of men worry
about women suffering, and some dying, of asthma. They try to help women during
an episode, try to help them fend it off, help fund their care; but they cannot
fully empathise with chronic shortness of breath, the fear of another
life-threatening attack, and the panic during that attack.
Men cannot
completely understand that women have to gear their entire lives around
something as fundamental as making sure they can breathe—not going out when the
air is particularly bad, losing workdays on account of sickness, needing air
purifiers, paying higher medical costs, making sure they never run out of
medication, getting paid less for being seen as weaker and less reliable.
Men cannot understand
how viscerally women demand to be free of this disease, and to live their lives
fully.
Now imagine that men
have so far controlled the quality of air we breathe, and that they choose this
kind even though there is other air they could breathe just as easily, air that
would free women of asthma. Imagine that they’ve simply refused to change the
air for… well, forever, even though women have been asking them to for…well,
forever, but that these requests are either seen as whiny, or weak, or too
militant, or too trivial to pay attention to. In this moment, in
October 2018, many women are incandescent with anger at the injustice of it
all, and are done with being patient. They want to breathe. They’ve decided to
set fire to this toxic oxygen, and to make it as uncomfortable for men as it is
for women. Maybe that will recruit men into the effort to switch to air that is
breathable by everyone. In this firestorm some
men will rightly burn, viz. MJ Akbar, who has already paid a price and whose
legacy will be not his journalism, nor his political life, but the brazenness
and arrogance with which he is facing a battalion of accusers. (We have come
far enough that he has paid a price. That’s new, hurrah.)
Some men will burn, or
at least be singed, whom we will not enjoy seeing burn—viz. Vinod Dua, who has
squandered much goodwill by scoffing at the trivialness of #MeToo and calling
it mudslinging. And yes, it is
possible that some men will wrongly burn. It’s not ideal, and nobody likes the
possibility. But it has taken this messy, surging fire to get men’s attention. Does that help
understand #MeToo? Nobody wants to spend
their time setting the air on fire. Women just want to get on with their lives
without being hampered by male impunity and the cultural privileging of
testosterone (even in language—‘grow a pair’, ‘man up’, ‘ballsy’, ‘don’t be a
pussy’). Bringing the odd predatory man to justice is only a tiny bandaid over
women’s wounds. What we need is fundamental change—institutional, educational,
social, and cultural.
Unless they enjoy
being burned, men have to acknowledge their part in the problem, and
proactively help to change it. Understand consent. Learn to read signals other
than fire. To do this, begin by listening with humility to the
entire range of things that make women uncomfortable. And to take it forward,
stand up to the bro code, step up, and join your voice to women’s.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/dear-men-please-understand-that-sexism-is-the-unjust-air-we-breathe-118101900563_1.html?code=a3NES1EwaCsrZjhWb21Z
